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My experience with interviewers is that they all believe that their pet question is "a surprisingly good filter". Considering that there is rarely a data-driven

My experience with interviewers is that they all believe that their pet question is "a surprisingly good filter". Considering that there is rarely a data-driven approach to recruiting, usually this statement has a heavy confirmation bias. Usually when you add data to the mix, you'll find that most questions are not significantly correlated with candidate success/failure once you condition on "ability to write any code at all".

ClumsyPilot 7y ago
That is my experience too. I had people swear by "multiply two numbers without using a multiplication sign" as their one and only coding challenge.
freedomben 7y ago
Completely agree. Early in my career I had what I thought was "a suprisingly good filter" question I would ask candidates. For a couple years I did this. We hired one guy who had failed my question and then fired him a couple months later, which heavily reinforced my belief in the value of this question. A couple years later I found the stack of resumes, some we hired, some we didn't. I realized that some of our best engineers had failed my question, and I had subsequently voted "no" (I was outvoted, fortunately, by my fellow panelists. Another reason I strongly advocate panel interviews but that's a separate discussion). I soon realized that my question was good at filtering out people who didn't think like me, not at filtering out people who would make good engineers. My takeaway was that everyone, especially me, could use a healthy dose of humility and self-skepticism. Not advocating swinging the pendulum into Impostor Syndrome (which I now struggle with sometimes), but somewhere in the middle is good and healthy IMHO.
mypalmike 7y ago
I knew a guy, a really good engineer, who used to ask people about a specific thing you would see in a log file from a particular open source server. The SQL "having" question isn't quite as bad, but neither question is good at assessing one's ability to solve problems.

ClumsyPilot 7y ago

That is my experience too. I had people swear by "multiply two numbers without using a multiplication sign" as their one and only coding challenge.

freedomben 7y ago

Completely agree. Early in my career I had what I thought was "a suprisingly good filter" question I would ask candidates. For a couple years I did this. We hired one guy who had failed my question and then fired him a couple months later, which heavily reinforced my belief in the value of this question. A couple years later I found the stack of resumes, some we hired, some we didn't. I realized that some of our best engineers had failed my question, and I had subsequently voted "no" (I was outvoted, fortunately, by my fellow panelists. Another reason I strongly advocate panel interviews but that's a separate discussion). I soon realized that my question was good at filtering out people who didn't think like me, not at filtering out people who would make good engineers. My takeaway was that everyone, especially me, could use a healthy dose of humility and self-skepticism. Not advocating swinging the pendulum into Impostor Syndrome (which I now struggle with sometimes), but somewhere in the middle is good and healthy IMHO.

mypalmike 7y ago

I knew a guy, a really good engineer, who used to ask people about a specific thing you would see in a log file from a particular open source server. The SQL "having" question isn't quite as bad, but neither question is good at assessing one's ability to solve problems.